I'd like to talk to you about confront.
And when you speak of experience, you must perforce be speaking about the ability to confront. That's fairly obvious, isn't it? You can't inspect something unless you're willing to confront it
Let's look at the mechanism now of someone who wants to inspect something or become familiar with something, who, while he inspects it, is giving himself all manner of jolts and upsets.
Now, supposing he rigged up something like this.
He said, "Well, I'm going to look at this big electrical panel and I'm going to inspect it."
And then he wired it up so that every time he came close to it, a 7 million volt arc arced off his nose between himself and the panels. He went over here and he built a couple of big tesla coils and he wired them all up through here, you see, and he connected the back of his head to the back of the coils, you know, so that every time he looks at the panel, he says, "bzzzzzt."
Now this appears to be a rather silly thing for anybody to do, doesn't it?
Audience: Yes.
Well, why are you doing it? Those are the problems I have.
Now imagine somebody being told and taking on total faith the idea that every time he inspected an electrical panel he would get a murderous shock. Supposing he did that and took it totally on faith and went up to an electrical panel and didn't get a shock and then assumed there must be something wrong with him.
So then he fixed it up so he'd get a shock when he looked at electrical panels because you weren't supposed to.
Well now, this is the kind of odd logic — and it is logic — you know, logic is a lot different than knowingness. Logic is a method of proving yourself conclusively wrong in spite of what you know.
And as an individual believes something should happen, can actually build up a logical concatenation, a logical series of associations, which prove conclusively and forever that it will happen.
Now basically, I'm talking about how an individual prevents himself from confronting something. We can see this in much less esoteric terms in a little boy who is told he must never go swimming. Just never go swimming. He just mustn't go swimming.
"Now, Johnny, you mustn't go swimming. You mustn't go swimming, Johnny. You mustn't go swimming. Never. You'll drown. I knew a little boy one time. He was just about your size and he went swimming and he drowned."
Oh, listening to this for fourteen or fifteen years, as far as little Johnny ever got on inspecting swimming underneath this terrific bombardment of how bad it was to go swimming, was to ask his mother when he could go - swimming.
And his mother said, 'Well, you can go swimming when you learn how." This we laughingly call education.
Now little Johnny gets to be the age of twenty-two, is standing innocently on the edge of a pool, falls in and knows exactly what he's now supposed to do: He's supposed to drown.
The acceptable behavior. He would be a traitor to all logic, the human race, home, flag and Mother if he didn't drown. So he's very accommodating and he drowns.
Well actually, injury and difficulties in life are of this sort of thing. I know we take a fellow and we drop him a hundred feet onto pavement and he goes squash.
And you say, "Well, how in the name of common sense could Ron or anybody else add this up into an absolute piece of idiocy because there the fellow is splattered all over the pavement."
Well, the difference is he isn't supposed to splatter all over the pavement, basically. But look what he had to accept before he could splatter all over the pavement.
And if you exaggerate all those things, you are supposed to splatter all over the pavement. Is there any reason why he shouldn't fall a hundred feet, bounce, pick himself up, dust himself off and say, "Whee." Even if it hurt a little bit when he hit, there's no reason why the hurt should continue.
Let's look at that as an actual fact.
Now, if we can take a burn — the fellow has just burned himself — and by a Touch Assist . . . And if you've never done a Touch Assist on yourself when you hurt yourself, go hurt yourself someplace and run a Touch Assist. Oh, you don't have to do that.
Why is it that an inspection of this burn results in its disappearance? Well obviously, somebody or something must be holding the burn in place if we can make it disappear. Of course, this argument I'm using is not very logical to somebody who has never seen a burn disappear. That is one of the more spectacular little, tiny, junior pieces of magic that a Scientologist can pull off.
Some momentary injury — a burn, a bruise, something like that — he does a Touch Assist on it. He says, "Look at my fingers, look at my fingers, look at my fingers, look at my fingers, look at my fingers," and all of a sudden, the thing goes "Yipe," you know, and the fellow says, "Well, there you are. So, and how is it now?"
The fellow looks at it and it's only slightly blue or something like that, so they knock off. Well, actually, they could go right on and run the blueness on down.
One of the wildest things I ever saw was a totally sprained ankle, one of these six to eight weeks in alternate hot pack sprained ankles disappear utterly and so on in about twenty minutes of a Touch Assist.
But what was the wildest thing about it all is that the coaches and the other people around who had seen the ankle swell up, when it went down again, assumed that it had never been sprained. They were incapable of inspecting this, you see. Because it doesn't happen.
You see, an ankle is supposed to, when sprained, stay sprained for a long time. It's like sometimes Scientologists aren't supposed to heal and don't do very much healing in the way of straight healing and so forth. It's idiocy. Why worry about it? Fellow wants to be sick, who are we to fix him up? Well, it's a waste of a Scientologist's time.
Now if he goes at the case and fixes the person up so that he doesn't have to be sick, that's quite something else, but to address an illness or something of that sort's rather nonsense.
So anyhow, an individual says that he shouldn't confront an injury. It must be that someplace in this injury is a decision not to confront the injury. If confronting the injury after the fact makes it well, then it follows logically, factually and knowingly, and more importantly, can be within the realm of anybody's inspection experience, that it only stays injured as long as it isn't thoroughly inspected.
Now we're dealing with something very fundamental that people get very intimate with called pain. And if you could do something about the pain in life or their pain resulting from living and so forth, why, you would be doing something quite remarkable, I think you would admit, but actually not very important — but it's something quite remarkable.
Now being able to confront causes the pain to disappear. Making a person unconscious causes the pain to disappear. Well, you know that.
I mean, a fellow's got a broken tibia or a dislocated medical bill or something, and somebody comes along and takes a big, long horse needle and dips it in some stuff and aside from the initial pain involved in it going in, a sleepy lassitude begins to occur. And the burned finger or the broken arm or sprained ankle, and so forth, no longer hurt.
And somebody says, "Well, isn't that interesting!" An opiate is very, very interesting. And it continues to be interesting right up to the time you start running it out.
Now you don't only have to erase the pain, you have to erase the opiate that is on top of the pain in order to get at the pain.-
What is unconsciousness? What is an opiate?
An opiate is something that renders a person insufficiently conscious that he can't confront. He can confront so little and so poorly that he can't confront enough to feel any ache or pain. That's what an opiate is.
Unconsciousness is another method of not confronting. That's all. It's another method of not becoming familiar. And man has developed a whole mechanism along the lines of these opiates. A person that has to have tranquilizers all the time is a person that doesn't dare confront anything, is just turning his back on life and he feels if he can turn his back long enough and retreat far enough, he's got it made. He hopes. He hopes he's got it made. But of course, one day he keeps retreating and he runs into a wall. He can't go any further.
Of course, the thing to do is to put in more opiates, isn't it, huh? And more opiates. And more opiates. And more. And more. And they stop working.
Now he's in bad shape until some drug company invents a new opiate.
All unconsciousness is, is a compounded unwillingness to confront. It's just a final answer to confronting.
Most people who can't see life at all are below the level of stupidity. They're into a delusory area where they think they know something. And it's very funny when you start to run out all this artificial information, one of the first things a preclear does is go unconscious. And that happens when you're busy running a Touch Assist on somebody's burned finger. The oddest thing you ever saw.
Somewhere along the line, why, the person goes wog, wog, no sensation, nothing. And he comes up on the other side and usually right on top of the wog it hurts like the mischief. Whew. Woof-woof-woof He actually, almost automatically, lays in this unconsciousness mechanism.
Every time a person goes unconscious, he puts himself just that much further back down the track. I'm not talking about sleep now. I'm just talking about the fact that he won't confront it. He just backs up further. He drops a curtain of not-knowingness between himself and life. A curtain of nonawareness between himself and life. And he feels if he can just draw a thick enough curtain between himself and life he's safe.
Why would anybody do this? He would do this simply if he believed life was totally painful.
How does life become totally painful? By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.
Well, people have been going this way for so long and have been doing this for so long that it's a way of life. The way to get there is to go wog.
People die. What happens to them?
Well, it's a cinch that if they live again, they don't ordinarily volunteer very easily to inspect the life they have just got through living. They very seldom do this. There are very few people that you meet on the street and you say, "What was your name in your last life?" that will look at you intelligently.
Yet we're up against something like this: We're up against what life is, not what somebody hopes it is. See, we can go on studying what we hope life is way over and down this labyrinth and in that sewer and up the other line and bury ourselves in the muck and mole holes of existence and say, "Well, we're studying what we hope life is. We're studying life as total love because if life is total love, then everybody'd love us and nobody'd hurt us and we'd be all right." Or some such computation. Look at the terrible shock this person gets. Life is total love. Well, might be. But not the way they're doing it.
Somebody comes along one day and says in a very nasty, nagging, stupid sort of voice, "I hate your guts." It's an awful shock to this person. It's quite an invalidation. Means he lost.
Well, one drops a curtain across those areas of his life which he feels it would be very, very dangerous to inspect and we're up against the idea that we have to inspect that which is, not that which we hope is and therefore, when we're busy inspecting, we inevitably and invariably run into nooks, corners, crannies and emerge on highroads, and boy, do we find ourselves by our lonely selves. It's certainly empty in all directions. Why, there hasn't been anybody out on this highroad for so long that there isn't even a signboard on it. Nobody's even selling Fords.
We come back off of this highroad, and we turn around to somebody, and we say, "Hey! There's a road up here."
And this person's down there, you know, in this labyrinth, and they're going this way through the nettles and everything, you know, and we say, "There's a road right up here," and they keep going through the nettles.
We walk along the road for a while, you know, following their course through the nettles, and so forth, and we finally say, "Hey, you idiot, there's a road right here."
Person says, "I know, but if I don't keep defending myself against these nettles I'm in, I'll get stung."
You walk up to somebody; he's absolutely ruining his morale and his family's patience and everything else; he's trying to paint. And he can paint all right. He's painting away, you know, he's painting away, doing a pretty job — paint, paint, paint, paint, paint. He's just fine. The pictures are great. But every time he paints one, he tears it up. How is he ever going to get to be a painter? And the family keep asking him this, you know, "Why do you tear them all up? Why don't you take them down to the magazine? Why don't you take them out and show them? Why don't you hold an exhibi — ."
"Oh, I know what I've got to do. You tear them up."
Well, a Scientologist gets ahold of this fellow and he thinks the guy's perfectly entitled to be able to paint and display a painting. He thinks that's perfectly all right and he starts to process the fellow and he looks in vain up and down this current life track, you know, he looks all over: paintings, paintings, there's nothing on painting in this life track.
Well, he starts asking embarrassing questions about 1468 and about 1597, and so forth, and he gets needle drops about this and that and he keeps asking the fellow more or less if he'd ever painted any other time and the meter he's got him on, you know, is falling off the pin and the fellow says, "No. I don't know what you're talking about."
Well, he's simply saying, "That is an area which is so painful that it's absolutely impossible to confront any part of it. If I did, Lord knows what would happen because it's a self-proving proposition. It's absolutely and utterly convincing. I lived that life and it killed me. So obviously, if I inspect it again, I'll kick off."
Then you finally find the life you want. He was an art critic who committed suicide at last out of a respect for public decency. And the fellow can hardly help himself. We get him inspecting the idea of being an art critic and the next thing you know, pictures of being an art critic and this and that, and he goes anaten, and it feels terrible and he's got pains here and there and it's awful and he feels pictures splattered against his face, and wow, wow, and he comes through it. And he looks at being an art critic, and so on. It doesn't mean anything except he gets off his nastiness at inspecting other people's pictures, you see.
He just gets off all those ovens. Well, he's trying to keep himself from being that nasty now. And he's trying to keep anybody from ever criticizing his pictures because he knows what would happen. It would practically murder him.
So you fix him up and he can paint pictures and he can display pictures and he can exhibit pictures and he feels fine about pictures and everybody's happy with him as a painter, and so forth. And the family's happy with him and he's happy with him and it all goes well, except there's this.
He turns around and says to somebody, "Well, I finally arrived as a painter because I ran out a life in the last part of the nineteenth century when I was an art critic on the London Times."
There's a horrible dead silence in the audience. He's hit an area of no communication. He was unwilling to confront it; we got him to confront it and inspect it; it couldn't have been confronted and inspected if it hadn't been there; there's no good saying it was a delusion when it knocks his silly head off.
Then he tries to communicate the fact to get somebody else to confront it and I don't know if they think all of the times they've been art critics, but most of them sit there and look awfully strange.
They're not usually as carping as people think they are. They are actually just kind of stunned and sometimes you'll see their self-defense mechanism spring into full play.
You know, they actually attack wildly in any direction but their own inspection.
Well, this fellow who has straightened himself out as an artist, he tries to tell some people about it and he has a hard time making the grade and he feels very lonely, you see. He feels very lonely being the only man in the world that ever lived before, so he obviously has to become a Scientologist to have any friends.-
No, not necessarily that, but he certainly has an excellent example there of the unwillingness to confront. Now actually, if he talked about it enough and talked about it long enough — the trouble is he doesn't talk about it enough. If he talked about it long enough, this fellow who is fighting him, the fellow that he's trying to tell it to, who fights him hardest, would be the first that would pass out.
He ought to take that one on as the easiest victory. "Well, don't you think it's reasonable that somebody might have lived before? Where would you think any of those mental image pictures you have come from?"
The fellow says, "What pictures?"
"Oh, the pictures you see just before you go to sleep." "Oh, that one."
Well, however it works out, we get an interplay of willingness to experience and unwillingness to experience. And these two things are complicated by the fact that we are sometimes unwilling to have other people experience things and sometimes force other people to experience things that we can't experience ourselves, we feel.
And whenever we do that, we've really set ourselves up in a beautiful plastic case. We make other people experience things that we ourselves know we should never make anybody experience but know basically that we ourselves couldn't experience.
And when we do that, why, then we have a zone or area in our own track that we know we shouldn't experience but which we're actually responsible for because we made somebody else experience it, don't you see?
That's how all first sergeants go to hell. That's used in a technical sense.
Now there's another operation which has been going on which brings up this whole subject of inventing zones and areas which are inexperienceable. Inventing an area or zone of knowledge which can't under any circumstances ever be experienced because it's a total non-agreed-upon whole cloth fabrication. Man, that's pretty wild, one of these things.
Somebody invents this whole thing and he says, "It's so big and so forth, and if you ever get in there you'll go mmmm and grrrr and they're terrible and you grraa and oh, don't ever get near — oh woof umph." And there it is. Stay away from that.
The only trouble is somebody tries to look at it, decides it doesn't exist and gets skeptical. So this other fellow has to make it worse. And he says, "Well, there's a whole second level that's much more — much worse than the first level. The first level's nothing. Anybody can get . . . The second level…"
I hate to remark upon it, but I think by the time of Dante they had seven hells. Well, it's pretty good. There's all kinds of these things.
Inventions that are inexperienceable and basically, they're inexperienceable because they don't exist. And that's one of the primary causes of inexperience. And if you've too often worked with a nonextant, inexperienceable zone, you might get the idea that no zones are experienceable. And a lot of people do get this idea. They say, "Well, there are no zones experienceable. There just aren't any. You can't experience this universe."
I know one whole group that formed toward the end of the nineteenth century which believes utterly and completely and positively that the physical universe is utterly inexperienceable. You hit them over the head with a club, they say, "Well, can't be." Big bumps rising, you know. Blood spattering all over the place.
And they say, "Well, that club is insubstantial matter and doesn't exist." Well, that looks to me that that's carrying it just a little bit too far.
Now it may be true that all things are inexperienceable. That's fine, except you can very readily banish that as a stable datum. There are some things that are experienceable.
So these things that become inexperienceable by reason of their nonexistence can be all messed up by taking an experienceable thing and saying it is nonextant and therefore inexperienceable.
And this nonexistent thing called the physical universe, you rap on it, you can't hear a thing. You kick it, feel nothing. And as for bodies, totally insubstantial. Can't feel anything. Bodies don't exist. They're merely a delusion. Complete delusion. See? (cough, cough, cough) Excuse me. Complete delusion.
Well, you'd say somebody's up the bend. He's halfway out the spout. You know, bullet tears through him and he stands there looking straight through the hole and he says, "Well, that's a good thing there's a hole there because there's no body there anyway."
Well now, if you get the fellow who is saying that to experience being a body, one of the first phenomena you run into is unconsciousness — dope-off, boil-off, anaten, grog and so forth.
Get him to experience his hand. There's an old gag along this line which is very amusing: is, you get somebody to flop his hands and ask him who's doing it, you know, that sort of thing. And very often because he's been flopping his hands and you ask him who's doing it, he has to notice his hands. You see, that's what the trick is. And he looks at these hands and he — it's the first time he's seen them, you know. It's a great shock to him.
Now there are lots of byroads then that a person could lead to. But I recall one individual, the poor fellow kept chattering about the akasic record. He was a preclear and he just kept talking about the akasic record.
And this akasic record was stored someplace and it had an enormous quantity of books in it and everybody's deeds, acts, past, future, present, all knowledge, everything else, was lodged in this akasic record and there was nothing you could do about it because they knew all about it and you couldn't vary the future and you couldn't have any self-determinism in this life because it was all in the akasic record already, wow!
Well, that was obviously a zone of nonexperience, wasn't it?
Obviously, he had never been in a library calling itself the akasic record and read everybody's books on the subject.
So I took the only other course of getting him to inspect the akasic record and got him to inspect the akasic record. Now how did I do that? Well, I just inspected the source of the akasic record. I found out who'd told him about the akasic record and then ran a communication or inspection process upon that person. And that was the end of the akasic record.
Somebody that had great altitude with him had told him all about this and practically beaten his head off with the subject, you see. The second we discharged this communication, the akasic record disappeared. You see?
Now it isn't quite like that in the physical universe. Your teacher told you about the physical universe when you were a child in school. And if you run out the teacher, we still got something there.
We can run out anybody that told us about the physical universe, practically, in modern times. And nothing happens to the physical universe. It's still here. It's still very much here. So it's worth getting familiar with.
And you can become familiar with the physical universe and if you became familiar enough with the physical universe, you would probably find out exactly where the physical universe started, ended and where it was going and you would know all there is to know about it.
But you wouldn't know what the nuclear physicist has found out about the physical universe because he's also found out a set of insubstantial data that can't be experienced and he's making awfully sure that nobody can experience it. He's being very careful that nobody ever experiences an atom bomb and lives through one alive.
Now he isn't actually a student of the physical universe. He's a student of the structure of the physical universe, but he's looking inside the back of beyond. He's looking in further, further and he's getting disappearing more and more and more and more and more, and you take most of these fellows and you say, "Look at that wall."-
And he looks up out of his atom, you know, and he looks and he says, "What wall?" And looks back.
Now the very use he's putting his information to tells you he must have a very strange idea about the whole thing because out of this, he's making something that nobody can confront: an atomic bomb. He's just making sure nobody can confront this thing. Wow! Pretty interesting when you come to think about it that that much information could be totally devoted in its end product to something nobody dared confront. Good.
Well, in Scientology you can go about this the other way to, also, and you can inspect the physical universe, nuclear physics or anything else that's inspectable in this line, and you can actually knock kicking the liability of being bombed out of existence. It takes quite a little bit of doing, but you actually can do this.
First time I ever realized this could be done, a fellow drove up in front of my house in Arizona, when I was out in Phoenix, Arizona. And we had an organization out there, and we were sitting out in the desert doing all sorts of interesting things.
This fellow drove up in front of the house and he just barely got the car into the drive and stopped, you know. And he sat there and he groped out the door, you know, and he groped around. And I saw him out in the front yard. I brought him in. His face was totally burned and his eyelids were swollen almost completely shut. He'd been driving on the road and he'd seen a horizon flash of a bomb test in Nevada. That far away.
He'd been looking in that direction at the wrong moment and it had practically fried his face. His eyes had started swelling up, and so forth. He was over closer to Nevada than we were when he saw this.
And I thought well, well, well, well, well. So all I got him to do was tell me where he saw it and where he was now. And where he saw it and where he was now. And where he saw it and where he was now.
And his eyes — the swelling went out of his eyes and his eyes got open and his face turned less red and everything was just getting along fine and then he recovered and that was that. Just on that silly process.
Of course, what I was doing was running the engram of having seen it. He himself was holding the effects of this thing in place. Obviously, he must have been because I wasn't processing the atom bomb. I was processing this guy.
And he was the only one present while we were processing, see, that had anything to do with the bomb. I hadn't seen the bomb. He had.
So we removed the impact of his having seen a bomb and what did we get? We got a cured face.
Well, this is very peculiar and quite heartbreaking to a physical scientist of these days. Very upsetting to them because it means that their total effect that nobody is supposed to experience is experienceable.
Something to remember, by the way, if anybody gets playful with these things, although we haven't studied the subject with any great exhaustiveness and so on, we could probably take care of some large percentage of the fringe burns rather easily just by Locational Group Processing.
We know we can do that because we've done it. How much more we could do of that would depend on how nonanaten everybody was that we were trying to process and how willing they were to confront the physical universe and how capable they were of sitting in a chair and being processed.
You see, this is all different factors that are involved here, but certainly we could get people burned sufficiently serious that without processing they would die. Certainly we can do that because we've done it. All on the basis of experiencing something. Re-experiencing something or seeing pictures of it which they already have and getting the familiarity with the picture and so forth.
Well, why did they get the picture? Well, they got the picture by resisting the actual experience and sort of printed themselves a picture — is what they really did.
The willingness to confront is what all this finally boils down to. The willingness to confront. The willingness to confront life. The willingness to confront, participate — participate isn't anywhere near as important as confront, oddly enough, in actual processing tests.
That's just as far as technical processing is concerned. Because the individual is here and he is himself — he is not a body — this is another little fact that drops out in your lap.
By the way, if somebody doubts that, I must remember to you the old, first exteriorization process that demonstrates to somebody with great sweeping and sudden truth that he is not a body.
We don't do it because it gives him the sensation of dying. He'll stay stably separated from a body for anything from fifteen minutes to three days and then he gets an old time when he left a body dead or something like that — he gets that keyed in again — and he feels unhappy and feels like he's just died or something. So we don't do this directly.
You could do this indirectly. As a matter of fact, it's almost impossible to stop somebody from going out of his head if you've processed him far enough, but the old one I must recall to your attention is: take somebody that's in particularly poor condition that's being very scornful or is being very mean or something like that or is trying to convince you utterly that you are a body or something like that, and just say, "Try not to be three feet back of your head." I must recall that to your attention. Because he finds himself back here promptly. There's his body up there.
"Try not to be three feet back of your head." He's stuck in his head on a reversal and it hits all lower level — very low level — cases and medium level cases that people are trying so hard to stick in their heads that the moment you tell them try not to stick in their heads, they push themselves out. It's kind of weird.
The fellow's out there in the middle of thin air. What you notice at once, his face changes shape usually, where it works, you see. His face changes shape, color of his skin changes, voice tones change. Maybe he spoke with a stuttering or an accent or something like that before. He now speaks very clearly. He's now thinking very logically. He's not all mixed up in what — he always thought he was thinking with his brain. And he's tried to think with his brain for so long, he's got all mixed up in his brain, you know.
He's got this idea, you see, of he's there, and it's not just an idea because it's an observable fact, but he's so unused to experiencing the universe directly — not through a pair of eyes; he's nice and safe, you see — he's so-unused to this that he puts up all kinds of pictures. And he gets all kinds of delusory messes on this thing and he thinks he's in hospitals and all sorts of weird things.
And then he goes flip and he goes back in, and you say, 'Well, now are you a body?"
"Oh, yes, yes, yes. I'm a body."
What you're looking at in such a case is, an individual is unable to experience what he has just experienced.
Sometimes for a whole day he will tell you, "Yes, I am a spirit. By golly, you know. What do you know? I am a spirit. I am outside of the head. And I feel so good, you know, and I'm outside of my head and so forth. And I'm not a body. I always thought I was a hunk of meat. And I'm not a hunk of meat. Gee, this is wonderful."
And you meet him 48 hours later and he says, "What head?"
These are the liabilities of inspecting existence. All sorts of interesting things occur while you're trying to inspect existence.
Of course, if a fellow is in pretty good shape or a little kid or something like that, all you have to say is just "Be three feet back of your head."
And he'll say, "Yeah."
And you're waiting for something to happen. Little kid's liable to say, "But isn't that rather close in?"
This thing has been going on for a very, very long time without anybody noticing it. All kinds of oddities exist in life and of course the truest of them are the least confronted of them because they would be the things that you would immediately snipe at if you were trying to make slaves and prisoners out of people. See, they'd be the very things that you wouldn't want them to see clearly.
You'd say those things are pretty bad. You know, spirits? Ghosts? You've ever been in a castle? Ghosts coming down, chains. Pretty bad people, ghosts. They screech and take care of your soul. All kinds of odd operations occur around any particular large area of truth because you can only make a slave out of another being by making it impossible, or trying to make it impossible, for him to observe truth.
If an individual begins to observe or experience truth, he becomes incapable of being a slave because he can't be hurt. He isn't afraid of life. He's ethical or moral or something like that because he's ethical or moral, not because somebody's going to punish him if he isn't ethical or moral. That's a different rationale.
Oddly enough, you find that the clearer a person gets, the more ethical - the person is. I haven't robbed a bank in years. You know, piggy banks, of course — mm-hm. Now — decades, centuries.
When you blur out some area of truth on an individual and when you say, "You mustn't inspect that area of truth," then the person becomes that less true. You get the idea? He is that much less a truth because he can't be or experience this area of truth over here, don't you see?
So then he's sort of backed into that much less truth and then he's that much less truth — some other zone gets obscured and then there's some other zone gets obscured and some other zone gets obscured and another zone gets reinterpreted; and finally he's just all the way backed out of being anything that's even closely resembling truth and he is in a valence. It goes gradually — if he is less and less himself because he himself is truth, less and less and less himself, and gradually he'll become more and more and more somebody else.
But there's nobody else there to be except something he synthesizes. He has to dream up something else to be. And whatever he dreams up that is something else rather than truth to be, to that degree he's a prisoner. Because any person who isn't himself is, of course, to that slight degree, a prisoner. Because he's a prisoner of lies and probably the only thing a man could be prisoner of would be lies.
Look at a prisoner in a prison. There he is in the prison. Well, he's put in the prison because the society tells him he's been a bad boy, so he must not and will not and cannot any longer confront. Get the idea? This is supposed to reform him. Make it impossible for him to confront life in any way. He's supposed to become a better man.
And then the statistics tell you that if a man is sent to prison, he again goes to prison and if he goes to prison again, why, then he goes back and goes to prison again, and he goes to prison . . . And it doesn't work patently but they keep doing it. It's obviously the most unworkable sphere of reform there is because crime statistics keep increasing and the numbers of prisoners keep increasing, and so forth, so that's why we should do it. It's obvious.
Now here's this fellow — here's this fellow in prison. Now how is he in prison? Well, the big problem is, is how in the name of common sense could he ever go to prison? How could he stay in a prison?
In the first place basically, as a being, he is not a body. Anything he knows or is has no substance connected with it at all. He can go straight through walls -psst. That's a fact Till you've done it a few times, you may not believe it, but it happens to be true.
How do you get anybody in prison? How do you get him to stay there? Boy, that's a tough problem. Completely aside from why should you ever put anybody in prison is the problem of how is it possible. Well, it's only possible by stripping the truth away from the man until he no longer knows the truth.
And the basic thing about criminals is, they cannot tell right from wrong. Now, they say that's a definition of insanity, but it's not. It's a definition of criminality because if a man could tell right from wrong, he would probably do the right things. But when he no longer can tell right from wrong, he does the wrong things.
I found out much to my surprise the other day why kleptomaniacs existed and it was terribly simple as a mechanism. A kleptomaniac cannot observe property. So he never knows whose it is. He's unable to differentiate in the ownership of property. He doesn't know who it belongs to or whose name is on it or whose it is or anything else.
So of course, he sees a piece of property, he just picks it up and takes it away.
Of course, actually, he doesn't do it at all. It kind of leaps into his hand. They're actually always telling judges this, you know, but judges never believe them.
"Well, Your Honor, it just was there and the next thing you know, it was in my pocket."
"Yeah."
Nobody believes them. Yet that's actually from their viewpoint what happened. They can't determine or control property. They can't handle MEST. So naturally, I don't think it's the law at all that builds the prisons. Couldn't be. The fellow can't differentiate what property is and can't tell what MEST is and can't go through MEST and hasn't anything to do with it — now, no material object has anything but menace to it as far as he's concerned, so naturally, you put him in the middle of four walls and he's going to stay there.
Oddly enough, if you leave him there for awhile, you can even open the door and he won't even walk out. That's a fact. I imagine if you went out to Wormwood Scrubs and left all the cell doors and everything else open, there'd be a certain percentage of prisoners that'd never walk out of the place.
They'd probably have a sit-down strike or start screaming because nobody was serving them food or something like this.
No telling what would happen, but what would happen to sane men in that position or sensible men in that position is not what happens to criminals.
A criminal has lost his ability to differentiate. He can't tell anything from anything. He has a total confusion about property. He doesn't know who he is. It's pathetic. But the only way he can become a criminal is by ceasing to be himself.
He becomes a criminal valence which does this and does that and there is nothing you can do about it. He is no longer himself. Truth is not in him. And he is no longer in any way truth. All because of what?
He himself locked out various zones and said he couldn't confront them anymore. He said there were areas of truth that he mustn't look at anymore. And saying these are things he mustn't confront anymore, he just moved back into lies, lies, lies, lies, lies and eventually was in a total fabric, a total labyrinth of lies and naturally was a total prisoner.
Now how would you get out of a prison if you were in one? I'm afraid you'd just do it by confronting. Everybody to some slight degree is a prisoner. He is a prisoner only to that degree that he is unwilling to confront an area. An actual physical area. Or an actual area of truth. He's a prisoner.
Man is having trouble with finance? Obviously, is unwilling to confront money. If a man is having trouble with marriage, there's some part of marriage that he can't confront. And where he can't confront things, then he mocks up and creates some artificial structure which has no basis in truth at all and confronts that instead.-
You want to set men free or if you want men to be free or you yourself want to be freer than you are, all you have to do is find out what you're willing to confront and what you're unwilling to confront. Basically, run long enough, oh, that would free a man of almost anything. It would permit him to find out almost anything. It would be a very informative process. But it's a long process, it's a long process.
The only reason it's a long process is because at first when he runs it, he is running it as somebody else, not himself. And when you ask him "What are you willing to confront?" he says, "What am I, Joe, in the valence of Mother, willing to confront?"
Takes him a long time to get back to a point where he can confront Mother, don't you see?
Now there are various other factors which enter into this. You could ask him, "What have you got yourself confused with?" Not a good route. Not a good process, but it certainly drives the point home. Because he's got himself confused with everything that is unable to confront. He's preventing himself from confronting by being things that can't confront.
All sorts of oddities occur. That isn't a whole answer to existence because there's another factor that enters in along this line, and that is the fact that man is basically good and tries to help his fellow men. And valences come into being, actually, when he fails to do so and considers himself bad. But that's beside the point.
The point is that he's trying to inspect life for somebody else, not himself.
Of course, even if he did that long enough, he'd eventually wind up inspecting life for himself. But this is where we get the zones of familiarity and this is where we get life and this is where we get communication, and so forth.
And it comes down to the original thesis of Scientology is that that you familiarize yourself with, you can recognize the truth or untruth of. And it's a direct process which does this and it's not a very difficult one to run.
It's a very odd thing to find that most preclears when they come in to be processed are being processed so they will not have to confront something.
And of course, one of the first things that breaks down under processing is their unwillingness to confront. So they're amongst the first to recognize this. Say, well, they didn't want to confront life, so that's why they're here.
Then of course, there's a lot further to go on something. There's a lot further to go on a case.
But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows.
Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.
Now, in Scientology we think it's a good thing to get man to do this and that itself might be a novel and individual view. However, we hold on to it. And it's a peculiarly individual view that man deserves to be helped and that man can help himself and that life is worth living. And even though that's a very peculiar set of rules to go by in this year of 1960, we nevertheless go by them.
I want to thank you very much for being here tonight. I consider it quite a compliment in view of the fact that I haven't had any practice lecturing and I forgot all my notes and didn't have anything to say. I want to thank you very much for coming here.
Good night.